Where have all the local honeybees gone?

Tuesday

Apr 2, 2013 at 2:00 AMApr 2, 2013 at 7:20 AM

NEW PALTZ — Chris Harp knows honeybees like few others in the region. He knows what they do and how they do it. He'll tell you that when you put colonies of bees at risk, you're putting life itself at risk.

BY JEREMIAH HORRIGAN

NEW PALTZ — Chris Harp knows honeybees like few others in the region. He knows what they do and how they do it. He'll tell you that when you put colonies of bees at risk, you're putting life itself at risk.

That's what's at stake with the phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder. CCD, as it's known, currently is devastating vast numbers bee hives — as much as 60 percent — which in turn is threatening hundreds of thousands of acres almonds, melons and other fruit in California alone.

"It's not like CCD is limited to one area," Harp said Monday. "It's worldwide. It's not coming here. It's already here."

Harp is the Johnny Appleseed of apiarists. His classes are packed and his schedule of bee caretaking appointments take him hundreds of miles away from the roughly million bees he keeps on three acres behind his home on Plains Road.

While federal regulatory agencies are only now just beginning to investigate the causes of CCD, Harp isn't so cautious. Many other environmental groups are convinced the pesticides, fungicides and herbicides used by large-scale farms are the cause of CCD.

Specifically, he's convinced a new class of long-lasting pesticides known as neonicotinoids are responsible for the latest outbreak of CCD.

While small-scale hobbyist beekeeping has "exploded" in the mid-Hudson, the principle users and beneficiaries of bee pollination are the region's fruit farms. And it's not the hobbyists whose hives pollinate local orchards. That job belongs primarily to a traveling horde of what might be called commercial gypsy bees.

These are bees that are shipped from Georgia (where they've pollinated that region's strawberry crop) into the mid-Hudson region by the truckload. Four hives are placed for every two acres of orchard. After about two to three weeks here, the bees return to the hives are trucked to Maine for the blueberry crop, then Illinois for soybean pollination.

Any sort of infection or disease that a bee can get — and they have very low immune systems — creates what Harp called a "cesspool" of infection.

Harp said he doesn't begrudge farmers their use of commercial bees. It's the only way they can survive. At one time, before CCD and other infections were less common, it was a benign practice. But today, it's become a positive threat to bee colonies and the industries they make possible.

When anyone asks Harp to explain the importance of bees to world ecology, he's fond of quoting a possibly apocryphal prediction of Albert Einstein's: